Tidying up

We all cling to Things beyond their usefulness. We waste untrivial amounts of our time, effort, and personal storage space so as to not Waste the material goods around us.
Sometimes this is simple sunk cost dissonance. We expended resources to acquire this thing, therefore it must have Value.
Some justify this clinging as a kind of anti-consumerism, rejecting the material waste of our single-use disposable economies.
But these ideas are just as materialistic and self defeating as the notions that they oppose. They implicitly assert that Things have intrinsic value beyond their utility, and that they must not only be acquired, but kept, even at great cost.
We are conditioned by the dominant capitalist ideology to treat price and value as interchangeable measures. That if something is expensive, it must be good. That all resources exist to be exploited. And that if something exists, it must be worth having. Outside of this frame is the heretical idea that some things, even shiny, new, expensive things, have no Value to us.
Not everything we possess must spark joy, there are other reasons to have things. But often we keep things in our lives not because they have any utility, or because we have an emotional connection to the them, but only because of a vague, unexamined notion that it would be Wrong to dispose of them.
Working in warehouses for half of my life has taught me that keeping things always comes at a cost. And that keeping more things makes that cost rise exponentially, not linearly.
Living through poverty taught me how little in life is actually essential, how much of this I could lose and still be happy. How, indeed, having less of some things might make me more happy.
We shouldn’t be irresponsible about how we dispose of things, sure. Recycle, donate, tap into circular economies in our community. But recognise that doing these things also has a cost. And sometimes we only hold on to things because we don’t have the personal resources to get rid of them optimally. It’s ok to take the easy route sometimes. We are never fully responsible for our material circumstances and a cluttered house does not have to be one of our penances for living under the almighty dollar. We have enough of those already.
Perhaps the best practice is to reduce our acquisition of things with limited usefulness. When we choose to acquire something, we can think about not just the monetary cost, but the other more subtle costs of Having a Thing. Where and how will we store it? How much space will it take up? How much will we need to move it around? How long will we keep it? How hard will it be to get rid of? Is it really worth it?
We won’t need to tidy it up if it’s not there.

Profit and Loss

Most of his comrades didn’t survive the war, but my Nonno did. My grandfather fought for the Italian anti fascist resistance, he would have been only nineteen when the war ended.

But it did end, and he did survive. And like the rest of us who find ourselves still alive after the world has ended, he had to keep on living.

He moved away from that place, about as far as he could go. He started a new life for himself and his soon-to-be wife.

He was a mechanic, found work in Perth and regional towns around Western Australia. One of those contracts, for six months in 1954, was at a CSR mine in northern WA. Only six months, in a place so cursed that it no longer exists.

Wittenoom was settled on the lands of the Banjima people to service the nearby blue asbestos mine. Blue asbestos was a rare and lucrative commodity, and there were huge deposits in the area. CSR and the WA government invested heavily in the mine and the town.

Tailings from the mine covered Wittenoom in fine blue dust. Houses, streets, playgrounds. People came home covered in blue. And because everything was covered in free asbestos (a great insulator, useful to people living in the outback) the resourceful townspeople recycled the dust, using it for construction, paint, and other projects.

Asbestos dust, especially from blue asbestos, is a poison. The dust is made of sharp, microscopic fibers. These fibers get deep into the lungs and damage the tissue. This causes chronic shortness of breath, coughing, and chest pain. Symptoms can arise many years after exposure. This condition is called asbestosis.

Asbestosis and its causes were well understood by as early as the 1930’s. By the time my Nonno got to Wittenoom, health experts had been warning for two decades about the risks of asbestos. Doctors had specifically warned the WA government about Wittenoom, predicting a huge number of asbestosis cases if business continued as normal.

But nothing is as precious as a hole in the ground. The company hired lobbyists to downplay the risks and talk up the economic benefits of the mine. No doubt palms were greased and promises made. Neither the company nor the government did anything to protect or even warn the people of Wittenoom until it was too late.

Asbestosis was understood and ignored. But there was another, greater danger hiding in the clouds of blue dust.

We now understand that asbestos dust particles can get stuck in the lungs forever. Decades after exposure, they can cause the lung tissue to mutate. This deadly and incurable cancer is mesothelioma. It is a horrible way to die.

I never met my Nonno, but I’ve heard his story. I try to remember him for the bravery it took to stand up to unmitigated authority, and not for the terror of combat. I try to think of the love he had for his family, how hard he worked to give them a good life, and not the agonising death he earned for that work.

But what is harder to see in a positive light are the decisions made by the people who knew better, who had the power to stop this, but didn’t. To date, they are responsible for over 2,000 deaths, and countless lifetimes of breathless suffering.

Only a monster would think that any amount of money is worth putting the health and safety of thousands of people at risk. But individuals acting as part of a larger organisation, corporation, government seem to be able to make those choices all the time.

The actions of CSR were awful, but they are not surprising. I wish things were different, but companies exist to make money. Employees make choices to maximise profit. Very little else is supposed to matter to them, from a job description perspective. And as long as owners and shareholders will only accept the numbers going up, companies will kill whoever they need to to make a buck.

What’s truly disgusting are the actions of politicians who presumably, hopefully, got into politics to help people, to make the world better. They took their mandate to serve the public and used it to throw thousands of people under the bus because the money-men were offering them a better deal. Truly idiotic, selfish, evil behaviour.

And this kind of thing is not just a relic of the 1950’s. It still goes on today. Western Australia is rich in resources, including fossil fuels. We have known for decades that burning fossil fuels adds to the greenhouse effect, which raises global temperatures and is causing climate change. We have known for decades that if we do not phase out fossil fuels immediately, future generations will suffer heatwaves, drought, bushfires, cyclones, flooding, food and water insecurity, refugee crises, war. We have known for decades that the longer we delay, the worse it will get. We have known for decades that we are running out of time.

But, Woodside’s shareholders need to see that number going up, so more gas has to come out of the ground. The politicians know this is the wrong thing to do, and they know that they have the power to make it stop. But the company can pay the cash-for-access, can donate to the party, can offer sweet jobs to retired premiers that did them favours. So, the company takes what the company wants.

By the time the consequences of this banal evil become obvious, it will be too late. When it does, no amount of compensation will make things right, it never did.

I can’t think about my grandfather without thinking about my own children, and their children. What menace is waiting in the blue cloud for them?

Better things

Some political arguments are just horseshit. Based on lies and misrepresentations, designed to play to people’s fears and prejudices and bypass their critical thinking. Although a provocative lie will always move faster and have more momentum than the clarification, context, and nuance needed to dispell it, it is nonetheless fairly straightforward to make an argument against horseshit. We point out the lie or logical fallacy and we’re done.

What is harder to argue against is the far more common kind of political argument. The kind where the falsehood does not lie in the facts or logic used to construct it, but in the underlying assumptions upon which that logic rests. Quite often, that false assumption is that The Way Thing Are is natural, normal, inevitable, correct. It isn’t. I don’t have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows shit’s fucked.

Fucked for most of us anyway. Obviously some people benefit from the status quo. And it is in those people’s political interests to argue that changing things is not only a bad idea, but a practical impossibility. When confronted with ideas for progressive change, stuff that would improve the lives of 99% of people at the cost of some excess wealth from the 1%, they say “that’s unrealistic. naive. it’s a good idea on paper. of course it would be nice if we could help people.. if only the world worked that way”.

But, The Way The World Works is not fixed and immutable. Our political and economic systems, our laws and social norms. All of it is in constant flux, historically speaking, prone to sudden upheaval and reconfiguration. So, when we try to suggest ways that our System can be more generous, sharing, compassionate, the counterarguments can go two ways.

First, horseshit arguments:
That redistributing wealth to make our society more equitable will be detrimental for whatever reason.
E.g. raising taxes on large corporations will damage the economy and thus hurt the working class (who are the ones receiving the benefits from the increased social services that these taxes are funding).
Or, that some people may cheat the system and become unjustly enriched, and that’s why we shouldn’t try to help anyone. Or, that a disadvantaged person is always 100% at fault for their situation. So, fuck them I guess.

Second, status quo apologies:
That The System just isn’t capable of delivering better outcomes for poor people. We’d love to spend more money on welfare, public healthcare, education etc. but there’s only so much money in the budget! So sorry.
The implication here is the The Economy (i.e. the combined labour and resources of a country) does not have enough productive power to provide a comfortable and secure lifestyle for everyone. Where every person at least has their basic needs met. This has always been untrue. Humanity has always been productive enough to provide for all, our communities could not grow if we couldn’t generate a surplus. But, that’s a topic for another time.

Notice that the argument isn’t that social policies are wrong or will lead to bad outcomes. Instead these policies are naive and over ambitious. Their unachievability self evident by the fact that we aren’t going to try.

How then, do we construct a counterargument? That a better state of affairs is not only achievable, but that the people telling you it isn’t are lying for their own political or economic gain. We can call on historical examples or analyse and unpack the numbers and facts. But the technical, practical arguments for progressive ideas won’t hit home if people don’t believe that a better world is possible.

What we need to do is get our interlocutor thinking critically about the status quo. Get them thinking creatively, hopefully, trustingly. All modes of thought that The System actively discourages. This is possible but difficult, depending on the preconceptions of the individual. But there is another, harder but more worthwhile, way to change people’s minds without even speaking to them.

We can to show them what is possible by making it happen.

Instead of supplicating to the political class and asking for a fairer deal, let’s just start taking care of each other. Build communities with our neighbours, then organise within those communities to provide care and aid for everyone. Successful strategies will grow, spread, multiply, mutate.

Through argument by example we can show how these ideas are not only realistic, but commonsense. Then what is possible will no longer be dictated by the powerful, but by the many.

‘Better Things Are Possible’ is the most important and difficult argument to win. But every person we convince is someone who can work to make the better things happen.

adults

Most of us will feel like a fraud, some of the time. Feel unprepared and ill-equipped for the role we’ve taken on. Worried that the ones around us agree, that we don’t deserve their respect.
Sometimes, our social anxiety is the fear that someone will see through our disguise to find that we’re just a kid wearing adult clothes, pretending to know what we’re doing. But it’s less stressful to know that most other people feel the same way too.
If we remember that we’re all just kids playing dress-ups, we can stop hanging our respect on what clothes someone has put on.
Respect can come from how nicely we play with each other. Compassion can come from knowing that we’re all a bit scared and overwhelmed sometimes, we’re all just doing our best to fit into our costumes.

this too shall pass

We make our worst assumptions when we expect things to always stay as they are. It’s tempting, we acclimatise to our situation, normalise it, take it for granted. It becomes painful to imagine how we would cope if things changed.

But things always change.

Things Always Change.

The universe is constantly in flux. Physics abhors vacuums because she abhors stasis. Nature loves to create equilibriums, but equilibrium is not static, oh no. Opposing forces balanced against each other perfectly may be stable temporarily and in isolation. But that stability comes from complexity. And Physics, she really hates complexity. Physics will spend aeons grinding away and picking apart all the complexity Nature can create. Evening out the energy, spreading out all the matter she can find to fill in those awful vacuums. Slowly but surely destroying all organisation, all equilibrium, all complexity. Nature is faster, but Physics has Time.

There’s no rule that says things have to be the way they are. There’s no rule that says things will stay the way they are. Through whatever crises we face, there’s no rule that says we will make it through, or even that we can. For equilibrium to persist against entropy takes energy. Survival is an ongoing process which will always require more work. And we can only ever work to delay our defeat, we can never win.

So, what to do?

Impermanence will only be a source of anxiety or despair if we resist it. It’s natural to want to hold on to the situation we find ourselves in. To weave it into our identity and protect it. But this will ultimately fail and cause heartache. We can accept that we live in flux, that we are a part of it. We can embrace each beautiful moment as it manifests, then let it go as the next one arises. For every moment is beautiful, even if it is not what we were hoping for. Indeed it is the hope, expectation, desire which makes us unsatisfied with things the way they are. Instead of working to align our circumstances to our desires, we can adapt our expectations. To expect only that things will change. Embracing impermanence forces us to stop, to really experience this moment as it happens. Because once it is gone, it won’t come back.

And neither will you.

You are matter and energy made from ancient stars, manifested temporarily as a complex and wonderful human mind. But that manifestation is like a wave on the ocean. A wave is something that water can do, but it has no independent existence of its own. When the circumstances are right and all the necessary matter and energy is present, the ocean does a wave, and a powerful and beautiful, but temporary form arises. When the right circumstances are no longer present, the wave crashes and the water goes back to being an ocean, perhaps to create another wave or some other form again in the future. So it is with you, your circumstances, the ones you love, the human race, and the world. All are just forms dancing across the surface of reality. Something the universe is doing, for now. Unique and miraculous, even more beautiful because of their ephemerality. Embrace them, then let them go.

Tesseract

Your visitor inhabits more than three dimensions. It exists in the room with you, but also in spaces you cannot perceive or reach. It arrived as if through some invisible door, expanding out of nowhere into your view. Occasionally parts or the whole will disappear back into that nowhere place and then re-emerge, sometimes in the same location as before, sometimes not.
Its form morphs and changes, suggesting glimpses of biological familiarity without ever quite looking whole. As if you are only ever seeing a three dimensional cross section of something your mind could never apprehend all at once. It has limbs, but it’s impossible to tell how many, or if that question even makes sense for this creature. At times you can see what looks like a head, but then the thing will shift without moving and there will be a different looking head in the same location. It is obviously trying to let you see as much of itself as possible.

From nowhere, it drops two hyperdice on the table between you. You were expecting this, you sigh. When at rest, the dice appear as small cubes with a different alien glyph on each face. What looks like a claw reaches out from the nonplace and manipulates a die. It twists the cube back and forth on the table. Moves it left and right, back and forward, lifts it up and puts it back down. Next the die and claw slide in and out of sight, shrinking into nothingness and expanding back into view.
The beast carefully rolls the die onto its different faces, flipping it ninety degrees each time and showing you all of the symbols. Then in a motion that is both eerily similar and totally incomprehensible, the die flips out and back into existence. It shrinks, and for a moment only the edge touching the table is visible, then expands out to full size again. But this time, every face has a different symbol than before. The beast continues to flip the hyperdie through all of its different cubes and display every face to you. After the eighth cube it finally flips back to the configuration you recognise as the first.

Satisfied that you understand, the hyperbeast begins the game. It rolls its die. The cube stutters in and out of view as it bounces across the table, spinning and tumbling in ways that cannot be possible. It comes to rest as a normal die would, except a bit smaller than it was before. You note the glyph on the top side and frown.
Your turn. The beast picks up the other die and places it deliberately in front of you.
You pick it up. It doesn’t feel unusual, just heavier than it looks. You look up toward the creature’s head. It approximates a nod. You throw. This time the die behaves normally, rolling and bouncing across the table without disappearing or changing faces.It stops, you both look, you sigh again.

The creature approches, it puts a claw around each of your shoulders and pulls you away. The room, your own body, and the universe turn inside out as you are dragged out of your native plane. You see alien landscapes morph hyperbolically through each other like some mind bending slide show as the beast carries you further and further from home. It gets harder to see as the sunlight shifts toward red, then past it. Soon it becomes hard to breathe. The light returns faintly as your captor comes to a stop. It puts you down gently and with your last gasp of consciousness you see another four hyperbeasts surround you. You collapse into a pile of bones, some are human, some are not.

Atonement (2015)

I would like to tell you two stories from my life with similar beginnings and very different endings.

One night in my late teens, a friend and I were standing outside a fast food restaurant. Several meters away were two girls about our age. An older man was talking to them and he was obviously making them uncomfortable. One of the girls looked over to me pleadingly, as if asking for me to intervene. I did nothing. I don’t know if it was indecision or fear or shyness. I wanted to help them, but for some reason I couldn’t. We walked away, and though I’m sure no harm came to the girls, I felt like I had failed somehow. That, though I had no obligation to intervene, it would have been the right thing to do.

For years that incident bugged me. The kind of memory that pops up occasionally to give you a little stab of shame and regret. I used to have a lot of those, these days I am more at peace with my past.

Then, one morning a few years later, I was on a train on my way to the city. A few seats away sat two teenage girls.An older man in the seat opposite was talking to them, I can’t remember what about. The girls were laughing awkwardly and the man’s behaviour was giving off a predatory vibe. The train rolled into the station and the girls quickly got up and made a beeline for the exit with the creepy guy in pursuit. I took it upon myself to do something, perhaps remembering the first incident, perhaps just because I had matured and changed somewhat in the few years that had passed. At the escalator to the concourse I placed myself  between the girls and the man. An argument quickly broke out as he tried to push past me to get to them. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but it culminated in him threatening to assault me just as we passed the turnstiles. This was a big mistake on his part as we were in full view of several security guards who quickly moved in to pacify the situation. All this had given the girls time to leave the station. I left too, as the man was now shouting at the guards instead of me and made my way to the city’s central plaza, which was only a few hundred meters away. As I made my way down from the elevated walkway from the train station I heard a crash behind me. I turned and saw that a “slippery when wet” sign had landed about a meter away. A man nearby said, “I think someone just threw that at you.” I saw the two girls from before looking at me and asked them, “Was that the guy?” One of them said, “Yes,” and “thank you.”

For me, these two incidents pose some interesting questions about morality. Firstly: Given a situation such as these, does one have a moral obligation to intervene? Or, given that it doesn’t concern you directly, is it better to mind your own business and stay out of it? In other words: Is it right to be a white knight? To impose your morality on a situation if you feel that it is necessary. Perhaps in some cases it is and others it isn’t. In these two instances I certainly feel like stepping in was or would have been the right thing to do.

Secondly: If intervening in such a situation is right, does my action in the second incident somehow make up for my inaction in the first? Is there some karmic equilibrium that can be reached when one’s good deeds equal their mistakes? I’m certainly proud of myself for how I handled the man in the city, but it only occurred to me today that maybe one act vindicates the other. If nothing else, I think that original sense of failure helped to sway my decision to act in the second event. Perhaps guilt and remorse are our moral compass’s way of telling us we are going in the wrong direction. If we can learn from these feelings, we can make better choices in the future. Then, if we are presented with the right situation, we can make the right decision where in the past we would have failed and psychologically atone for our past mistakes. Perhaps that is where the real karma lies, in our own mind’s judgement of ourselves and whether our past makes us worthy.

Somnolence

I welcome sleep
That sweet relief from the ecstasy of experience
The agony of constant sensation
Life, for all its joyous moments
Can also be tiresome and monotonous
A yolk of burden upon my living soul
I don’t fear death
For as much as I don’t want my life to end
I know one day it will
And I will be relieved of all obligation
All guilt and expectation
Returned to that purest of states
Nonexistence
Death is my long absent friend
Whom I will once again embrace
At long last
Nothingness, the home of my soul
Whence it came, it shall return
And finally
Sleep

Levels

I wrote a joke about an elevator.
It works on so many levels.

Impulse

As now becomes yesterday
And Earth spins the hours away
I hold this moment in its place
This is one I shall not waste